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Monthly Archives: July 2008

About half a year ago I published my first results for a C vs. JVMs benchmark. Some version updates appeared since then and so I thought it’s time for another run.

Some words about the benchmarks

Four of the five benchmarks stem from benchmarks found on the The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. They have been modified to reveal the peak performance of the virtual machines, which means that each benchmark basically runs 10 times in a single process. The first run might be negatively influenced by the JIT compiler and isn’t counted and only the remaining 9 times are used to compute the average duration.
The fifth benchmark is called “himeno benchmark” and was ported from C code to java. Himeno runs long enough such that the warm up phase doesn’t matter much.

Compilers and JVMs used in this comparison

GCC 4.2.3 was taken as a performance baseline. All programs were compiled with the options “-O3 -msse2 -march=native -mfpmath=387 -funroll-loops -fomit-frame-pointer”. Please note that using profile guided optimizations might improve performance further.

LLVM has just released version 2.3 and is a very interesting project. It can compile c and c++ code using a GCC frontend to bytecode. It comes with a JIT that runs the bytecode on the target platform (aditionally it even offers an ahead of time compiler). It is used for various interesting projects and companies like most noteably apple for an OpenGL JIT and some people seem to work on using LLVM as a JIT compiler for OpenJDK. I used the lli JIT compiler command with the options -mcpu=core2 -mattr=sse42.

IBM has released it’s JDK 6 with it’s usual incredible bad marketing (of course there’s no windows version yet). I’ve used JDK 6 SR1, but I couldn’t find a readable list of what changes it includes. The older IBM JDK 5 is also included to see if it was worth the wait.

Excelsior has released a new version of it’s ahead of time compiler JET. Both version 6.0 and 6.4 have been benchmarked. JET is particularly interesting because it combines fast startup time and high peak performance and is therefore just what you’d expect from a good desktop application compiler.

Apache Harmony is also included in the benchmark. It’s aimed to become a full APL licenced java runtime and used for the google android platform. Recently the Apache Harmony Milestone 6 was released. I’ve taken a look at this version’s performance in this blog.

BEA JRockit is no longer included due to a great uncertainness about it’s current and future availability. A short period after Oracle bought BEA all download links were removed from the web page. A few days ago it was announced that JRockit will no longer be available as a standalone download.